Almagest

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The Sun trine Mercury

the Sun trine Mercury between two charts in synastry (the two cannot stand at this angle within a single nativity)

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun and Mercury cannot stand a hundred and twenty degrees apart: Ptolemy states that Mercury never reaches a greater distance from the Sun than the space of one sign, and modern delineators confirm conjunction is the only major aspect the two can form in one nativity, a trine's distance lying far beyond Mercury's own possible range from its Sun. The mind flowing easily with identity at this wide an angle is not, therefore, something one person's own chart can show; the tradition reads it only between two separate charts, where the constraint does not apply. Between two charts, one person's Sun trine another's Mercury is read as an active, mental contact suggesting a genuinely positive flow of communication and shared activity, the two people simply enjoying each other's company in conversation, a flow the tradition credits, as with every trine, to the ease of two compatible elements meeting without needing to be worked at.

The story

A trine is a hundred and twenty degrees, a third of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the sextile, harmonious, since the signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, a judgment about the angle rather than about the particular bodies standing in it. Mercury's myth carries the same generosity into this easier register. As an infant he was already credited with inventing the lyre from a tortoise shell; separately, Apollo, the god most closely tied to the sun's own light, awarded him a magic wand that became the caduceus, the staff of two entwined snakes, and Mercury became Jupiter's own messenger and Apollo's steady companion. A mind offered nothing but an easy, flowing angle to another person's identity is simply Mercury doing what the myth already shows him doing best, carrying something freely between two parties who are glad of the exchange.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Mercury:trine.